According to a report at the conservative Bulwark, hosts and commentators on Kremlin-backed media are watching with fascination as Donald Trump tries to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, applauding the American president for creating chaos in his own country.
While a flurry of lawsuits from lawyers representing the president who is alleging fraud have been shot down in the courts, Russian media is playing up the fighting over the U.S. election with one commentator calling the proceeding in the U.S. "hilarious."
According to the report, when Trump claimed victory in 2016, the Kremlin-backed press claimed him as "one of us" and have been highly supportive of his dealings with Vladimir Putin since then. Now that the president is on his way out in January, they are reveling in his disruption of a high-turnout election that should be a model for the world -- particularly during the COVID-19 health crisis.
"Pro-Kremlin Russian punditry is clearly basking in schadenfreude at the thought of American elections being compromised after all the times the United States has lectured other countries—and, specifically, Russia—about elections that failed the 'free and fair' test," the Bulwarks Cathy Young wrote before adding, "[The] American election was the focus of the popular Evening with Vladimir Solovyov on Rossiya-1. Solovyov, who stands out even among the Russian TV pundit class as a particularly aggressive pro-Kremlin propagandist, opened the program with the smirking announcement that 'while the counting of votes in the United States is not yet over, it’s already hilarious.' Informing his viewers that 'absolutely nobody [in the U.S.] trusts the electoral system,' Solovyov asserted that 'some precincts simply barred observers' from watching the vote count: 'It’s just brilliant. This is what they call an electoral system.'"
Russian political analyst Sergei Stankevich, added, "Most likely, the Democrats will be able to torture the arithmetic until they get a win—that is, Biden will be declared president of the United States. But he will be a president without legitimacy, because a thick cloud of doubt will hang over his presidency for many Americans.”
He then suggested, "Millions of his votes came from mail-in ballots, and no one will ever know how many of those votes were from real people.”
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